Discarded containers in modernist arrangements. Or at least that’s how the arrangements strike me. Because they are arranged on a flat surface and photographed from above, these container collections read more as pattern and graphic design than as objects in space. And from a certain perspective, flat and 2D = “modern.”

Although, these groupings are also reminiscent of how objects might be organized in a museum, so maybe they’re really “old school.”

Creating a decorative “order” from the “disorder” of litter & landfill, Rosenthal’s photographs seem to serve various constituencies. Clearly part of the Significant Objects meme, but equally at home in Austin Radcliffe’s Things Organized Neatly collection.

What is it about patterns of equally spaced objects that appeals to us? I reckon there’s some science behind it. Or maybe math.

As long as we’re talking about super-long brand names, consider the extended philosophical discussion between trademarked brands debating the existence of butter. (At least within the confines of their own packaging.)

Not a complete catalog. There are more copy-cat store-brands and knock-off butter-substitutes than you can shake a stick at.

Jergens believed that Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific filled a unique niche within the congested fragrance hair product category. According to Jergens, its product was the only brand that boasted lasting fragrance as the primary benefit. Competing products, in contrast, focused on enjoying the scents while using the shampoos and conditioners. The company believed that its brand’s catchy, descriptive name created a strong personality for the product while clearly conveying its intent and benefit. Gee was packaged in brightly colored bottles with the logo in modern bubble letters to catch the eye of the teen consumer.

This is a trend that’s been around for a while now: to include declarative statements in product brand names. Similar in a way to the 1970 exclamatory brands names that were complete sentences ending in exclamation points. (I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific!)

Here, however, there are no exclamation points and the style is more dry and understated, almost to the most of impartiality. Similar to the effect you’d achieve if you went around your home and labeling each object with a label maker—except that it’s done with a complete sentence, usually starting with the words “This is…”

I think the source of this “declarative” package design style is actually 1960s conceptual art.

Upper left: René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images) 1928–29; upper right: Joseph Kosuth, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) The Word “Definition” 1966-68; lower left: John Baldessari, “Everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work.” 1966–68; lower right: Luis Camnitzer, This is a mirror. You are a written sentence., 1966

OK, I know Magritte is generally considered a surrealist, rather than a conceptual artist, but his paradoxical painted sentence “This is not a pipe” is perhaps the earliest and most influential example of an artwork referring to itself as “this.”

During breakfast last week, I suddenly noticed that the package design for the Florida’s Natural orange juice carton now includes a prominent picture the carton itself. (And that the smaller carton in the picture also includes a picture of itself…)

“Budweiser Fine Arts Week” is over. This post is a not part of that. (The eight day, 8-pack of artworks featuring the Budweiser beer brand that ended yesterday.) Although it does follow the Budweiser thread a bit longer…

You know, it’s risky to pursue a single subject here for too long. These week-long digressions inevitably lead to a certain package-design-blog “consumer confusion.”

Someone tuning in midweek might understandably get the impression that box vox was more about contemporary art & Budweiser beer, than, say, package design. I know of at least one person who visited this site in February of 2010 and concluded that box vox was a blog all about egg-shaped stuff.

Probably it would be safer to adhere to a steady diet of brand & design-related sound-bites, but maybe I am not as risk averse as I thought…

Meanwhile: why has Budweiser been the pervasive choice for so many artists? Because the ubiquitous brand becomes the generic, default choice.

The photos the cigarette pack & beer bottle above relate both to brand extension and to this idea of brand prominence as a generic, default choice… as suggested in Budweiser’s 2005 trademark tagline, “This is Budweiser. This is beer.” (Now abandoned)

In 2010, when I found photos of a test-marketed Marlboro Beer, the first thing I wondered was whether there might also be Budweiser cigarettes. By rights I should have been looking for Miller Beer cigarettes, since it was Phillip Morris’s purchase of Miller Brewing in the early 1970s that had led to the Marlboro Beer experiment. In my mind, however, Budweiser was the generic, default choice for beer. Just as Marlboro was the generic, default choice for cigarettes. I therefore felt that Budweiser cigarettes and Marlboro beer would make a perfect couple.

Then last week, I happened to find these pictures of some promotional “Budweiser cigarettes” on Worthpoint. I would have preferred a full-color red, white & blue pack in the classic 1886 style, rather than the 1896 Anheuser-Busch “Eagle” or the 1960 “Budweiser Bowtie.” More of an advertising promotion that a full-on brand extension, but still… close enough.

(More Budweiser tobacco, after the fold…)

Not an Anheuser-Busch product, this cut-plug tobacco tin was made by the Lovell & Buffington Tobacco Company in the early 1900s. I’m guessing this product did not figure into the 1907 “Budweiser trademark dispute” between competing Budweiser beer companies.

“This Piece Has No Title Yet” is the title of Cady Noland’s 1989 installation with boxes, flags and hundreds of stacked Budweiser six-packs.

In the late 1980s Noland began a series of sculptures and installations examining the masculine underpinnings of the American dream, embodied in men’s beer consumption. Crate of Beer (1989) is a wire-mesh basket full of empty Budweiser cans. In her 1989 untitled installation at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Noland stacked six-packs of Budweiser atop one another. Metal scaffolding transformed these mountains of alcohol into a construction site. For the artist, Bud cans are as potent an American symbol as Old Glory, both being red, white, and blue.

Noland stacks hundreds of Budweiser six-packs along the walls, erecting sheer cliffs at the base of which shorter rows and pyramids of beer cans are ordered. Presented here is an image of overwhelming intoxication and, at the same time, incredible waste, the whole mighty edifice destined to be chugged and pissed away…

Then, about a decade ago, for whatever reason, she absented herself. Noland hasn’t had a gallery or museum exhibition in more than 10 years. When her work turns up in group shows it is said that she tries to have it removed.

Cady Noland… who holds the record for the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living woman ($6.6m), is a reclusive figurative sculptor whose work explores the sordid underbelly of the American dream. It has been over a decade since she has publicly exhibited her work, leading some to wonder whether she has stopped making art.

Marc Jancou, of the gallery by that name on West 24th Street, has sued both Sotheby’s and Cady Noland after the auction house withdrew a work that he had consigned by the artist, Cowboys Milking (1990), from its contemporary day sale this past fall. Another work by the artist, Oozewald (1989), sold for $6.6 million with premium, a new artist’s record, at the Sotheby’s fall evening sale (over a high estimate at $3 million), just one day before Mr. Jancou’s Noland was to have been sold. Mr. Jancou now claims that the auction house owes him $6 million in damages and that Ms. Noland owes him $20 million.

News of the lawsuit broke in the art world newsletter the Baer Faxt, which reported that the sometimes fickle Ms. Noland “apparently disavowed the work,” so Sotheby’s yanked the consignment. The lawsuit’s complaint doesn’t mention this, but says Ms. Noland “tortuously interfered with the consignment agreement by persuading Sotheby’s to breach the agreement.”

If nothing else comes from dealer Marc Jancou’s ongoing legal battle with legendarily reclusive artist Cady Noland, it at least has offered a bit of window into how difficult it is to get ahold of her. In fresh court documents filed in the last few days, a representative says he had to visit her New York apartment no less than four times in an attempt to serve her legal papers. The first time, he wrote in an affidavit, the artist “refused to come down or let me in the building to serve the papers.” Finally, after three further unsuccessful attempts, he was let in by another tenant, sliding the papers under Noland’s door.